Today’s Highlight in History:

On September 30, 1955, actor James Dean, 24, was killed in a two-car collision near Cholame, California.

On this date:

In 1399, England’s King Richard II was deposed by Parliament; he was succeeded by his cousin, Henry of Bolingbroke, who was crowned as King Henry IV.

In 1777, the Continental Congress — forced to flee in the face of advancing British forces — moved to York, Pennsylvania.

In 1791, Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute” premiered in Vienna, Austria.

In 1846, Boston dentist William Morton used ether as an anesthetic for the first time as he extracted an ulcerated tooth from merchant Eben Frost.

In 1915, the D.H. Lawrence novel “The Rainbow” was published in London by Methuen & Co.

In 1938, after co-signing the Munich Agreement allowing Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said, “I believe it is peace for our time.”

In 1939, the first college football game to be televised was shown on experimental station W2XBS in New York as Fordham University defeated Waynesburg College, 34-7.

In 1949, the Berlin Airlift came to an end.

In 1954, the first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus, was commissioned by the U.S. Navy.

In 1962, James Meredith, a black student, was escorted by federal marshals to the campus of the University of Mississippi, where he enrolled for classes the next day; Meredith’s presence sparked rioting that claimed two lives. The National Farm Workers Association, founded by Cesar Chavez and a forerunner of the United Farm Workers, held its first meeting in Fresno, California.

In 1988, Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev retired President Andrei A. Gromyko from the Politburo and fired other old-guard leaders in a Kremlin shake-up.

In 1997, France’s Roman Catholic Church apologized for its silence during the systematic persecution and deportation of Jews by the pro-Nazi Vichy regime.

Ten years ago: Out of jail after 85 days, New York Times reporter Judith Miller testified before a grand jury investigating the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity. Six Mexicans were killed in a string of robberies targeting Hispanic immigrants at trailer parks in and around Tifton, Georgia. (Stacey Bernard Sims and Jamie Underwood received long prison sentences for the killings.)

Five years ago: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Guatemalan leaders to apologize for 1940s U.S.-led experiments that infected occupants of a Guatemala mental hospital with syphilis, apparently to test the effectiveness of penicillin against some sexually transmitted diseases. The government of Ecuador declared a state of siege after rebellious police angered by a law that cut their benefits plunged the small South American nation into chaos.

One year ago: Under withering criticism from Congress, Secret Service Director Julia Pierson admitted failures in her agency’s critical mission of protecting the president but repeatedly sidestepped key questions about how a knife-carrying intruder penetrated ring after ring of security before finally being tackled deep inside the White House. U.S. and Afghan officials signed a long-delayed security pact to keep nearly 10,000 American forces in Afghanistan beyond the planned final withdrawal of U.S. and international combat forces at the end of the year. The first case of Ebola diagnosed in the U.S. was confirmed in a patient who had recently traveled from Liberia to Dallas. President Barack Obama showered praise on India’s new prime minister, Narendra Modi, in an Oval Office meeting. California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the nation’s first statewide ban on single-use plastic bags at grocery and convenience stores. Geraldine “Jerrie” Mock, 88, an Ohio homemaker who’d made aviation history by becoming the first female to fly solo around the world in 1964, died in Quincy, Florida.

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